The online home of the Digital Man

Here’s a video I shot recently with Jon Standring of Morningstar. Jon asked me about MeaningfulMoney and why I do what I do there. Jon was a great interviewer and I enjoyed playing up to the camera as usual! By the way, here’s the original post on the Morningstar site.

Most people who know me, know that I and my financial planning firm have an excellent relationship with Seven Investment Management. We outsource the vast majority of our investment management to them, which enable us to concentrate on what we’re good at (financial planning) and let go of what we’re not (running money day-to-day). They look after nearly £60m of our clients’ money and they have done a superb job with it, through incredibly challenging times. We and our clients love they way they work; they remove the burden of investment management, allowing our clients to get on with living.

In this superb interview by Rob Kingsbury of the excellent T4B Magazine, Tom & Justin explain how they think investment management should be done, as distinct from the client relationship. It’s an important message, and worth 16 minutes of your time, or you could read the written precis. (The link takes you to a digital magazine, where you can click the link on p8 to play the video)

Many people will tell you that you should have a social media plan, a strategy, some KPIs to measure and clear rules to keep ahead of that nasty compliance manager. Call me a cynic, but the people usually telling you this stuff are those selling their own consultancy services.

Now if you’re a big corporate, with shareholders to please and lawyers to placate, you may well benefit from some of these things, but this is why most big companies suck at social.

For most ordinary people, and certainly for most financial advisers, you might as well forget about all that. Social is about sharing yourself, your views and your personality, so that people can get to know you before they even pick up the phone to make an appointment to see you.

As I write I am preparing for my second presentation at the Institute of Financial Planning’s annual conference at the Celtic Manor. For those who are interested after attending, or for those who couldn’t get to the sessions, I have a resources page here, which has the slides, video and audio files, and some useful links. Do let me know what you think, and if you were at either session, I’d love to hear your feedback, either in the comments on the resources page, or via email.

I contributed the talking head to this video, but BrightTalk did a great job of the animation etc. BightTalk asked me for a short video rant about something, anything, that I was concerned about and they turned that into the video you see above. Kudos to them and thanks for the opportunity!

I’m about to take a couple of weeks’ annual leave from work. For the first week the family and I are off to Centreparcs at Longleat. If there’s anywhere guaranteed to chill you out it’s Centreparcs. It is perfect for all the family, and my kids are now at the age when they amuse themselves all day and just come back to us when they need refuelling.

In that first week, for the first time in a long time, I’ll be totally disconnecting from the internet.

I wonder what we’ll all talk about when the RDR is finally in place? I foresee seminars and branch meetings filled with awkward silences and tumbleweed drifting across the meeting room floor. Then someone will announce that all advisers will have to be qualified to level 6 by 2017, everyone will take a deep breath, and the cycle will begin again.

Like so many workers these days, I spend hours per day staring at a computer screen. There are obviously many distractions when you are permanently connected, so it’s easy to lose focus and just surf, sometimes for hours on end.

When starting out blogging, it can feel strange, unnatural even, to be expressing yourself in a new way. The same is true when standing in front of a video camera and when podcasting, though I have no experience of the latter. This initial awkwardness is eventually overcome when you find your voice online.

More and more people are sharing their expertise and passion online. Easy-publishing tools like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress mean that it is easier than ever for anyone to set up a website and begin sharing, which means the world is getting noisier.